Who is correct? Are we becoming better off or worse off? Where are we heading?
Moreover, during the movie’s initial release, you could see An Affair to Remember in CinemaScope–as you could at the Chicago Film Festival’s CinemaScope retrospective a couple of years back, and as you probably still can in Paris today. In Sleepless in Seattle you can catch only “scanned” clips of it on various TV sets, with about a third of the image removed from both sides of the frame. Some marketing executives decided many years ago that we all preferred to see films that way on TV, without the benefit of McCarey’s exquisitely composed and measured framing; they assumed it was better to eliminate a third of the image than to use a letterboxed format. Properly speaking, a better title for the movie as it now appears in Sleepless in Seattle would be An Affair to Remember Piecemeal.
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It’s theoretically possible, of course, that producers and marketing “experts” at 20th Century-Fox back in 1957 decided, long before Nora Ephron, that An Affair to Remember was to some extent a “woman’s picture.” But even if they did, it’s important to bear in mind that a division of labor still existed then between creative people and salespeople: regardless of what the producers thought and regardless of what the ads said, McCarey could still turn out a movie that could make someone like me cry. Today, when demographic thinking exerts a much greater influence on screenwriting and directing, as I’m sure it did on Sleepless in Seattle, the chance of someone like me being reduced to tears is much lower. And if I wanted to explain why I wept at McCarey’s movie in Paris 20 years ago while my former girlfriend laughed, I wouldn’t try to delve into what was wrong with me or with her; I’d try to discuss what was right about An Affair to Remember–irrespective of what marketing executives thought then or now.
It would be wrong, I think, to place all of the blame for this state of affairs on the film industry. Out in the “real” world, where competing interest groups clamor for “politically correct” representations of their identities and concerns, what these identities and concerns actually consist of often is reduced and oversimplified for practical reasons. Just as some men cry at so-called women’s pictures, some women may feel that their political interests can be represented by men, even if it isn’t always politically efficacious to say so. Unfortunately, what gets said is assumed to be what “women want.” The same thing applies, of course, to whites who feel that blacks can represent them (or the reverse). As one woman writer pointed out to me recently–to cite one of the many disparate casualties of PC discourse–it’s become very hard nowadays to even think of criticizing mothers or motherhood.
In terms of short-term gains, the logic of these companies’ lack of concern may seem impeccable, but the tendency of this policy to waste genres and cycles as well as sensibilities recalls the scorched-earth policy of Reaganomics–use up whatever resources you have now and don’t worry about next year’s crop. If you believe the industry analysts, there’s simply no way out of this sterile recycling of old ideas and compulsive remakes and sequels; so much for the alleged freedom of open minds and markets.
